Gaétan Gosselin was given the gift of one extra day of life because a child happened to pass his home in St-Léonard at the exact moment cold-blooded killers were prepared to shoot him.

The details behind how Gosselin was granted one extra day to live were among the many presented in court while five men with ties to a Montreal street gang called Unit 44 were charged with the murder of Raynald Desjardins’s business partner and close friend. The five men pleaded guilty on Thursday to being part of a conspiracy to kill Gosselin, on Jan. 22, 2013. One of the five, Olivier Gay, 34, also pleaded to being part of a conspiracy to murder Vincenzo Scuderi, 49, who was killed nine days after Gosselin.

Both men appeared to be on the opposing side of Vito Rizzuto, the now-deceased Mob boss, who was, in 2013, attempting to maintain control as the head of the Montreal Mafia. Desjardins was part of a group that tried to take control away from the Rizzuto organization in 2010 and 2011 while Rizzuto was behind bars in the U.S. At the time of his death, Scuderi was under investigation in Project Clemenza. The RCMP investigation revealed Scuderi was a close lieutenant of Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito, a leader of a Mafia clan who despised the Rizzuto organization.

Vito Rizzuto’s name was not mentioned at all during the Quebec Superior Court hearing before Justice Guy Cournoyer where Gay and the four other men — Edrick Antoine, 29, Stanley Minuty, 33, Kevin Tate, 33, and Léonard Faustin Étienne, 37 — entered their pleas on conspiracy charges. But when the murders were carried out in 2013, police sources speculated the slayings were part of Rizzuto’s attempt to maintain control of the leadership of the Montreal Mafia.

Rizzuto died of natural causes on Dec. 23, 2013. De Vito died of cyanide poisoning inside a federal penitentiary on July 8, 2013.

Evidence heard during a preliminary inquiry in 2014 revealed the killers had Gosselin lined up for a hit the day before he was shot, but called it off when someone noticed that a man and a child happened to walk past Gosselin’s home in St-Léonard while he was putting out his garbage that evening.

Smart phones seized later in the investigation revealed that after the hit was called off, Gay sent a text message to Tate saying: “I scrapped it bro. There was a man with his child passing by at the same moment.” Video images recorded by a security camera installed outside Gosselin’s home in St-Léonard showed a man and a child did indeed walk by at the key moment. The camera also captured images of a van that drove past Gosselin’s home very slowly while he put out his trash.

A street gang leader named Harry Mytil appeared to be issuing orders on the hit from Toronto that day. Mytil, who was killed at his home in Laval three months after Gosselin and Scuderi were killed, was in Toronto and he sent a text message to Tate, ordering that Gosselin be killed the following morning. Tate rejected this and texted back that it would be better to carry out the hit at night.

“It was perfect. It was just the kid who f–ked the ambience. We will redo it in the same way, the same place, the same location so it will work,” Tate wrote. Gosselin was killed the following night, after arriving home from a grocery store.

While there was evidence to suggest Mytil had input in both slayings, the Crown noted, in a statement of facts submitted to the court that: “The evidence gathered up to now did not permit us to discover with certainty who was or were the people who ordered (the two murders).”

Scuderi was killed nine days later and a text message Gay sent to Mytil provided a link to both homicides. The message was referred to in the statement of facts submitted to the court on Thursday.

“In the minutes that followed the murder, Gay texted to Mytil: “10-4” (a police code meaning “understood” or that something is finished).

Gay also texted: “There’s never two without three, send in the third.” He was using an expression commonly used in French “Jamais deux sans trois,” and it was an apparent reference to the hit on Gosselin.

Gay then texted: “I have begun to have a taste for this.”

Brother gives victim impact statement

Cournoyer will decide next week whether he agrees with the joint recommendations made on sentences for the five men. The recommendations ranged from an 18-year overall prison term for Gay to a 9-year term for Étienne.

Scuderi’s brother Gino gave a victim impact statement on Thursday. He said Vincenzo Scuderi was murdered in front of the home where he ‎lived with his mother.

“How does a mother recover from walking out her door and seeing paramedics working on the bullet-riddled and lifeless body of her son and every day from then on walking past the spot where her son was killed? Well, she doesn’t, nor will she ever,” Gino Scuderi said. “My mother was destroyed that day.”